Thousands of migrants reach Austria

Hungary buses Syrians to border; Germany pledges an open door

New York Times

Published 7:16 pm, Saturday, September 5, 2015

Photo: Hans Punz

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Migrants arrive at the Westbahnhof station in Vienna, Austria, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2015, where they came from Hungary as Austria in the early-morning hours said it and Germany would let them in. (AP Photo/Hans Punz) ORG XMIT: XPZ104 less

Migrants arrive at the Westbahnhof station in Vienna, Austria, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2015, where they came from Hungary as Austria in the early-morning hours said it and Germany would let them in. (AP Photo/Hans ... more

Photo: Hans Punz

Thousands of migrants reach Austria

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Budapest, Hungary

Thousands of weary but relieved refugees arrived Saturday at Hungary's border with Austria, brought there by the Hungarian government after it decided to give the Syrians passage through the country rather than keep them in Budapest against their will.

Buses began dropping asylum seekers off at the border during the night. Many of the Syrians had been walking through Hungary for hours after authorities closed the main railroad station in Budapest, where the refugees had set up a tent city and waited for days to get out.

Many of the migrants are determined to get to Austria and Germany, whose leaders said early Saturday that they would let refugees in unimpeded from Hungary, which does not want them.

But the standoff with the Hungarian government may not be over, let alone the monumental migrant crisis facing Europe, the biggest since World War II. A spokesman for Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the buses were a one-time-only measure sparked by concerns that the refugees who started walking from Budapest on Friday presented a safety hazard.

"That was an extraordinary situation when thousands of people started marching on one of the busiest not only Hungarian but international motorways, blocking traffic," Zoltan Kovacs, the spokesman, told the BBC.

He cited the "increasing resistance" of migrants to cooperating with Hungarian authorities who tried to register or send them to camps set up to process new arrivals. In what's become a bitter war of words, Kovacs continued to blame Germany humanitarianism for the mass movement of migrants through Hungary, after Berlin's pledge to welcome as many as 800,000 refugees fleeing war in Syria and other countries.

"The fundamental problem is still the pull factor that is being transmitted from Germany and Austria," he said, adding that Hungary was upholding its duty to protect the external borders of the European Union.

The Hungarian government has come in for widespread criticism for its treatment of the refugees, who Orban says are unwanted because most are Muslims whose presence would threaten Europe's Christian identity.

After closing the railroad station in Budapest, Hungarian authorities also essentially duped hundreds of migrants into boarding trains that they thought were heading to Austria and Germany but that instead took them to a camp about 20 miles away.

That raised suspicions among some refugees that the buses being organized by the government to take them to the border with Austria were another trap. But in the end, many boarded in hope, and found themselves getting to where they wanted to go: out of Hungary.

The group reaching Austria early Saturday may be just the beginning of a huge wave. An estimated 340,000 people fleeing violence, persecution or poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa have crossed into Europe this year, with little sign that the numbers will abate any time soon.

Thousands are traversing the Balkan nations and then spilling into Hungary on their way to Germany, which has pledged to accept more refugees than all of the other 27 EU countries combined. Hungary, by contrast, is building a fence with razor wire along its nearly 110-mile border with Serbia to keep migrants out.

Germany and France have called for a refugee quota system to distribute the burden more fairly among EU nations. But Central and Eastern European states such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic oppose such measures.